


The Earth Takes Everyone

by GrapieBee



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Descriptions of radiation poisoning, Discussion of Chernobyl Accident, Discussion of the Soviet Union, F/F, Gen, M/M, No Beta, They/Them pronouns for Death, They/Them pronouns for Pollution, future depictions of illness to come, tags will change as needed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 15:08:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20010319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrapieBee/pseuds/GrapieBee
Summary: It was 1986 and Crowley hadn’t left the Soviet Union in nearly two years.





	The Earth Takes Everyone

**Author's Note:**

> Be warned, this fic will cover some heavy topics. I will do my best to update the tags as thing come up in chapters and in the notes before too. Thank you for reading and reviewing!

**_“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”_ **

-Zinaida Yevdokimovna Kovalenko, from Svetlana Aleksievich’s _Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster_

=========================

It was 1986 and Crowley hadn’t left the Soviet Union in nearly two years.

Between the Titanic hitting that big piece of ice, the two world wars humans decided to have nearly back to back, and people on the moon becoming A Thing, Crowley had to hand it to the 20th century; it had truly tired him right the fuck out and it wasn’t even _over_ yet.

Knowing that, you would have thought he’d be enjoying the fact that the last two years had been, well, rather easy on him. Hell had wanted him here, had all but ripped him right out of the new flat he had only recently settled into in London and told him to get out there and make as much trouble as he could between the Soviets and the Americans. Something about how War herself had become antsy with what the humans had been calling a ‘Cold War’.

A weird oxymoron if Crowley had ever heard one; regardless, he’d been made to choose where he would go nearly at the drop of a hat.

Considering the last time he’d been state-side he’d accidentally instigated the robbery at the Watergate Hotel that ended so poorly, Crowley resigned himself to what he had hoped would be a short stint behind the Iron Curtain. 

It was not.

The country was so streamlined and _gray_ that Crowley had a hard time telling the different cities from one another. There was nothing to break up the monotone of similar cityscapes; making it consistently feel like many of these so called ‘Atom Towns’ all shared a similar -if not literally identical- blueprint between each other. It left each city as nothing more than a blur full of mostly fairly well behaved people controlled by black-hearted men.

The Soviets had become so good at systematically keeping their citizens in line (except the miners[*], thank Someone for the miners) that there was little point in trying to make things more miserable. 

The upper party members never needed to be tempted much for them to start doing ridiculous things to their citizens and, honestly, Crowley might be a demon, but he wasn’t a _monster._ He knew how to recognize when things were already bad enough without his help to make things worse.

[*The Soviet Union was still so dependent on the use of coal for energy, despite the nuclear power plants they kept building, that miners could often do or say what others couldn’t. They were some of the only people in the country who would dare refuse an order or ask a question and not go missing. Crowley sought out their company for that reason to begin with; it was the alcohol and humor that kept him coming back.]

All in all, it should have felt like a vacation of sorts.

It didn’t.

Quite frankly, he was nearly bored to discorporation at this point. The internal infrastructure of the Soviet Union was...less than ideal, in so many words. It was nearly impossible to tell with any consistency where his temptation filled words might ripple out to. It was even harder to really know how much someone’s influence actually spread. Sometimes he’d be working a particular person, whispering just the right words that their higher up needed to hear, only to find that they had suddenly moved far away overnight. It just _happened_ here and no one so much as batted an eye it seemed like.

At the end of the day, the work had long since becoming unsatisfying and Hell had really been expecting something to come of his efforts sooner rather than later. He knew he would have to produce some sort of solid result before long, lest he be sorry about not doing so sooner. The last discussion had sent him back to Earth with an impressively swollen upper lip and a bruised eye that could _just_ be covered by the dark glass of his shades.

This was the thought that stayed with him as he drifted to sleep, another day done and the prospect of potential failure hanging heavy over him.

Crowley awoke at 1:23:55AM to the sensation of falling, quite literally, to the floor. Something, with a capital had pulled at him from behind his ribs, yanking him into consciousness roughly.

Something Had Happened. Not because of him, but something was Different from when he fell asleep. Whatever it was, it was big and it was nasty and-

When the tiny radio he kept in the small apartment switches channels of its own volition, accidentally left on as he dozed, Crowley has to force himself to stay still as Beelzubub’s voice, their _actual_ voice, crackled through it.

“Crowley, I swear to everything unholy, you better not be sleepi-“

“I’m here, Lord Beelzubub.” Crowley cut them off, groaning softly to himself as he clambered to his feet.

“Pollution is in the same country as you, as I’m sure you’re well aware by now.”

Crowley doesn't even wait a beat, merely files the information away to the back of his mind as words roll off his tongue, smooth as silk,

“Yeah, plenty aware, my Lord.” He finished as politely as he could, which was not very at all.

“How about this: be a good field agent, go and greet them correctly, how about that, Crowley?”

Crowley didn't miss the hint of venom in Beelzebub’s tone, usually only brought out during moments of stress. Maybe the visit had been a rude surprise for them too. Maybe he should ask about it.

“Sure, I’m on it.” He says instead, leaving sleeping dogs be and all that. If he was meant to be the welcoming party for the Horseman (Horse _person_?), he was content with believing he could fill in the blanks as he went along. It usually worked and, honestly, the fewer questions you had in Hell, the easier it was to be left to your own devices.

As he’s straightening his sleep mussed hair in the small, dingy mirror that came with the front entrance of the apartment, the radio crackled once more. 

"Crowley, a word of warning: don’t get too close to the site of the accident. Your corporation can get fucked up only so many times before even occult intervention won’t save you from a visit down here. I’ll make sure to have the forms drawn up and ready for you, in case you still manage discorporation.”

Without further pause, the radio cut back to the patriotic station that was playing softly before, the announcer reciting a blatantly propaganda inspired poem. 

There are many things that distinguish an ethereal or infernal corporation from an actual human body. 

The first of these things being that the corporations were often incapable of natural changes; disease did not touch them, nor time, nor even really the weather, save for the old storms sent by Her personally. 

The second of these things being that certain functions of said corporations were, well, not removed per say, but tweaked. Important things that would help them blend in with the population were still automatic, even if they weren’t necessarily needed; breathing, balance on two feet, blinking, though Crowley’s corporations never seemed to really get the hang of the last two.

The third of these things being that corporeal forms were far, far more resilient than the average human body.

Even with these facts in the forefront of his mind, Crowley still felt himself hesitate, Beelzubub’s warning ringing in his ears for just a moment, before he snapped his fingers and was gone.

==================

The Horsemen had always loved Eastern Europe.

War had her own well-loved and worn stomping grounds.

Famine had his fingers in so many pies there it was absolutely _hellish_ sometimes.

Death...well, Death was always everywhere, but they found the place more comfortable than mankind probably would like them to be.

Even Pestilence, once upon a time, had found pleasure in turning up to bask in the misery of those so incredibly sick; sick from war, sick from the cold, sick from hard labor.

It was Pollution, however, who had yet to really dig their fingers into this part of God’s green Earth. 

So, when the feeling of inherent wrongness that a man-made disaster has to it pulled them towards Chernobyl at precisely 1:23:45am on April 26, 1986, Pollution smiled as they followed it, like a bloodhound to prey.

They’re there, on the roof of the reactor building, only moments after the red hot graphite has tumbled in broken pieces to the ground, disguised like any other debris to the untrained eye. But they know, they know about the ugly pulse of radioactivity shining off those chunks like beacons in the early morning darkness. They can feel it, can practically taste every ounce of the men’s Greed and Pride and Sloth that went into causing this blossom of chaos and they _love it._

They begin to move, carefully, across the roof to the edge, their long, thin fingers curling along what remains of the guardrail, peering over it. The billowing cloud of black poison spewing from the broken core dared not ruffle a single one of the white hairs on their head. 

Good, that was good.

Pollution hadn’t seen this much Uranium-235 in the air since Nagasaki and Hiroshima, nearly forty-one years ago. An odd little element, unbalanced and devastating, given the right conditions. The bombs had been bad, had wiped out so much life, had left behind so much pain. Even still, people had been able to move back to their homes in relative safety only a decade later.

But this...this was a whole different ball game, as they had heard the humans say.

There was already radioactive fallout climbing in the air on the wind from the screeching heat of the exposed core, pumping toxins and poison at concentrations hundreds of times higher than Pollution had ever seen them on Earth before.

A smile, small and cold, formed on their lips as they peer up and into the night sky, marveling at the beautiful color of the air directly over the spewing maw. The taste of metal hung heavy in the air as the radiation ionized the very oxygen molecules overhead, casting a bright blue beacon of light into the sky, as if to announce their arrival. 

As if to say _Something has Started; Something is Here._

Softly, ever so softly, Pollution began to laugh, their unblinking, pale eyes wide and ready to see if mankind had finally set themselves up for their inevitable doom.


End file.
